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32 THE COAL TRADE BULLETIN.
organized labor, many leaders of organized labor
even, have often asked this question and usually
have answered it in the negative. The labor organizations
will survive, because, I believe, American
laborers will see the necessity of wise, conservative,
concerted action before it is too late,
and when wise, honest labor men will insist on
pulling away from those who are just the reverse
—when they refuse to endorse self-confessed gi afters
and red-handed murderers.
I confidently believe that the representatives of
organized labor will ponder well the reasons that
exist for heeding the advice of those whose training
and patriotism enable them to speak out of a
wide and convincing experience, and from a desire
to serve their country.
Before presenting my reasons for advocating the
system of joint trade agreements in the United
States, I wish to say at this time, and on this
auspicious occasion, that there are some plain,
homely truths, of paramount importance, that
must be presented, and that you must
accept, if the great movement in which
you are engaged, and the moderate success which
you are to-day celebrating with so much commendable
enthusiasm, is to be an unqualified success
and a permanent benefit to its adherents and
to the country at large.
First of all, let me emphasize the fact that the
masses in America must learn that we can no
more equalize fortunes and conditions than we can
equally distribute brain or brawn. Some misguided
leaders are trying to convince wage earners
that this can be done. The power to do this,
let me declare, does not rest in man; it rests alone
in the Almighty.
WAGES CANNOT ALWAYS ADVANCE.
They must also learn that wages cannot always
advance, and if it is a principle of organized labor,
as some labor leaders insist, never to surrender
any advance in wages, or any advantage once obtained,
then either this principle or else the system
of joint trade agreements must be given up.
If the system of joint trade agreements is not
elastic enough to sympathetically respond to pronounced
changes in trade conditions, then it is
not the system for which the American people are
in eager, earnest and determined search.
Your organization may secure for you the highest
scale of wages, but your earnings must be
made large by your individual effort. Depend
upon it, that only insofar as you put heart and
brain into your work, can a high scale of wages,
or any scale at all, be of benefit to you. Nor will
these higher wages be to your advantage unless
out of your greater earnings you save something
for that rainy day almost sure to come in the
experience of all men—something that shall build
a home in which honor, virtue and faith are a supreme
trinity to successfully contend with ignorance,
want and doubt.
I believe that—no matter what others may say
to the contrary—every intelligent employer of
labor, who has taken the time to give the matter
due consideration, is willing to pay to labor every
cent to which it is entitled, providing the quality
of the service which is rendered is the best of
which the employe is capable. I believe that
under the system of joint trade agreements organized
capital will enforce this rule where at
present it does not exist.
If you are determined to preserve your union,
you must be faithful to your pledges and loyal to
your leaders. You must, as individuals, feel
bound by and respect all contracts made for you
by your officials, and after a contract has been
made, you cannot afford to set its provisions
aside by legislative enactments. You may be
able to convince time serving politicians that this
is right, but the public—never. If you intend
that the principles of trade unionism shall prevail,
if you want them recognized and yourselvs reif
you want them recognized and yourselves regood
workmanship, for integrity, and for fidelity
to country. The mere loud, boastful claim of
some of your leaders that union labor is always
the best doesn't make it so. You must make it
so, and you must convince those who buy it that
you know what you are talking about.
The eight-hour law, the enactment of which you
annually celebrate, is a good thing. I believe in
it, but only insofar as the laboring man uses his
leizure for his own material or intellectual advancement,
or for the benefit of his wife and of
his children. God bless these wives and children,
for I know from a close study of men—the heads
and the providers of families—that they too often
are the objects of our last instead of our first care.
Make them universally our first thought and care,
and this world of ours will be a brighter and
better world. If, by reason of the shorter hours
of labor, you improve yourselves, and you confer
benefits upon those dependent upon you, you have
reason to rejoice; but if the hours of leisure
which you have obtained by reason of the shorter
hours of labor are to be used in dissipation or
riotous living, then it were far better that your
hours of leisure were reduced, and your hours of
work increased, for idleness is the prolific mother
of the deadliest sins.
LABOR'S BEST REPRESENTATIVES MUST CONTROL.
Labor organizations have grown strong, and
they now possess such power for good or for evil
that the time has arrived when the administration
of its affairs must be controlled, not by petty politicians,
not by its weakest, but by its strongest